The Relationship Between Married Couple’s Emotional Expressivity and Marital Satisfaction During COVID-19 Pandemic in Makassar

Abstract

Married couple have their respective duties and roles in living household life. The married couple also strives to achieve happiness and satisfaction in their marital relationship. Marital satisfaction is an evaluation of a married couple related to their happiness and satisfaction with their marital relationship. An aspect of marital satisfaction is communication. Communication aims to express their ideas, thoughts and emotions to other individuals (spouse). The pattern and style of expressing emotions and thoughts are known as emotional expressivity. In interpersonal relationships such as a married couple's relationship, the tendency to express emotionally has an impact on the level of marital satisfaction. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to see the relationship between married couples' emotional expressivity and marital satisfaction during the COVID-19 pandemic in Makassar. The subjects of this study are 88 people (44 spouses) with a range of 20 to 60 years and were taken based on snowball sampling. Data were collected by distributing Self-Expression within Family Questionnaire (SEFQ) and ENRICH Marital Satisfaction Scale (EMSS). This study used descriptive analysis and Pearson product-moment to analyze the data. The analysis showed that the significance level is 0.393 (p>0.05) which indicates that emotional expressivity is not significantly related to a married couple's marital satisfaction. Then, 0.092 as correlation coefficients which means that the higher emotional expressivity is, the higher marital satisfaction as well, but the relationship between the two is weak.